Recall Issued After Two People Find a Rotting Bat in Their Walmart Salad

Love a simple salad that you can pick up from the grocery store for a quick and easy lunch? Do you fear bats and rodents? If so, read on with extreme caution.

Fresh Express has recalled its Organic Marketside Spring Mix from Walmart stores throughout the Southeastern United States today, after two people found a dead bat in their pre-packaged salads over the weekend. They reported eating some the salad before discovering the dead animal in their food.

This wasn't just a case of a gross animal making its way into food, which has been known to happen. The salad could have literally killed it's hapless victims: According to a report from the CDC, the bat was tested, but, terrifyingly, the “deteriorated condition of the bat did not allow for CDC to definitively rule out whether this bat had rabies.” As a precaution, both people underwent rabies treatment.

In their own statement, Fresh Express avoided addressing the bat problem specifically, saying only that “extraneous animal matter was allegedly found in a single container of the salad.”

If you're a frequent Walmart shopper, be advised that only the Marketside Spring Mix with a best-if-used-by date of April 14, 2017, is being pulled from stores.

The bat case is a little different, because usally it's rodents that sneak into human food, ready to scare the hell out innocent shoppers: Back in 2014, a man allegedly found a dead mouse in a wrap he ordered from the Pine Street location of the New York City chain Chop’t. His co-worker then tweeted a photo of his rodent-tainted lunch with the caption, "My colleague ordered a wrap and got a rat @Chopt."

The New York City Health Department later inspected the Pine Street Chop’t, where, mysteriously, they found no evidence of “rodent activity whatsoever.”

In another incident in 2015, a British man discovered a live mouse burrowing into the loaf of white bread he had just bought. Back in 2009, another man found a dead mouse embedded in the bottom of bread he had purchased online through Tesco – it had been squished and then baked into the corner of the loaf. The next year, Premier Foods, who produces the bread, had to pay him more than 11,000 pounds for his ordeal.

The disgusting trend is not limited to rodents though: Frogs and dead birds have been found in bags of salad, too.

In New York City, food establishments are rigorously checked by the health department and given a letter grade, so if you’re worried about finding an animal intruder in your food, it’s probably best to avoid places that haven’t earned an A. Thrillist also recently reported that shoppers should avoid deli salads as a general rule. The system is flawed in other places though: Take the Chinese restaurant Rice Bowl in Tucson, that passed a health inspection with a score of 70, which allowed it to stay open, despite the fact that the inspector found “animal carcasses hanging like laundry,” behind the restaurant.

The lesson in all of this? Stick to the fresh produce (unless it has spiders).